"This Is Imperialism": Eight Months After U.S. Special Forces Seized Venezuela's President in a Raid on Caracas, Trump Announced the United States Had Taken "Majority Control" of More Than 65 Billion Barrels of Venezuela's Oil — a Stake Second Only to Saudi Aramco — Struck With the Government That Replaced the Leader America Captured, to Paper Over the Record Gas Prices His Own Iran War Created

There is a word for a powerful country that overthrows the leader of a weaker one and then takes control of its oil. Michael McFaul, no radical — he was the U.S. ambassador to Russia under Obama, a career diplomat and Stanford scholar — used it plainly: "This is imperialism." When the mainstream, institutional center of American foreign-policy thinking reaches for that word about an action of the U.S. government, the action has left the bounds of ordinary statecraft.

What Trump announced

On August 28, 2026, Trump posted on Truth Social that the United States had secured "majority control" of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela's proven oil reserves. The structure, as he described it in sparse terms: a new company, formed with private business partners, in which the U.S. would hold roughly a 55% stake and the right to buy oil at cost. Such an entity would be the second-largest corporate holder of proven oil reserves on Earth, behind only Saudi Aramco. Trump framed it as a way to double American oil reserves and lower gas prices. He provided few specifics — no treaty text, no clear legal basis, no accounting of who the private partners are.

How the United States got there

The deal cannot be read apart from how it became possible. In January 2026, U.S. special forces carried out a raid on Caracas and captured Venezuela's sitting president, Nicolás Maduro (along with his wife, Cilia Flores), removing him to the United States to face federal narcoterrorism and drug-trafficking charges. Whatever one thinks of Maduro — an authoritarian under indictment — the United States seized a foreign head of state by military force. The oil negotiations then proceeded with the government that filled the vacuum, led by acting president Delcy Rodríguez.

Line the events up and the shape is unmistakable: remove the leader, deal with his replacement, take the oil. A deal to hand majority control of a nation's primary natural resource to the foreign power that just captured its president, signed by the government that power's action installed, raises an obvious question of legitimacy and coercion — whether this is a sovereign agreement at all, or a resource transfer extracted at the point of the leverage a military operation created. That is precisely the dynamic the word "colonial," used by other analysts, is meant to describe.

Why he did it now

The motive is domestic, and it points back at Trump's own record. He is under mounting pressure over record-high gas prices — the most expensive August on record — driven by the Strait of Hormuz standoff and the Iran war he started, documented elsewhere in this archive. The U.S. has been draining its Strategic Petroleum Reserve to blunt the pain; it fell below 300 million barrels in early August, down more than 100 million since the start of the year. Having created a fuel crisis with one war, Trump is reaching for another country's oil to cover it. The Venezuelan reserves are being seized, in effect, to pay for the consequences of the Iranian misadventure. It is one self-inflicted wound being dressed with the resources of a nation the U.S. invaded.

The grift question

And then there is the structure. This is not simply the U.S. Treasury acquiring oil; it is a "partnership with private business" announced with almost no transparency about who those partners are or how the profits flow. Critics at Common Dreams called it "yet another Trump grift," and the concern is legitimate: an opaque arrangement, few details, private beneficiaries, and enormous sums, assembled by an administration this archive has repeatedly documented converting public power into private gain. When the government seizes an asset worth hundreds of billions and routes it through a private company whose owners it will not name, the burden is on the government to show it is not a giveaway. That burden has not been met.

Why it belongs here

Strip away the euphemisms — "deal," "partnership," "majority control" — and what remains is a superpower taking a weaker nation's oil after decapitating its government, to relieve a price crisis of its own making, through an opaque vehicle that may enrich private allies, with no congressional authorization and a legal basis Trump has not bothered to explain. Analysts have called on Congress to halt it. Whether Congress will is uncertain. But the significance does not wait on that. A former U.S. ambassador looked at his own country's conduct and called it imperialism, and the facts do not contradict him. The United States has long been accused, by its critics, of fighting for oil while denying it. This time it removed the president, announced the ownership stake, and put it on Truth Social.